arXiv:2507.04453cs.LG2025-07被引 3

不用反向传播,用进化策略高效对齐大模型,速度更快、资源更省。

ESSA: Evolutionary Strategies for Scalable Alignment

  • 用黑箱优化+低秩适配器的奇异值,实现无梯度对齐
  • 在多个数据集上提升准确率12.6%~22.5%,且训练更快
  • 适合大规模部署,支持INT4/INT8量化,硬件友好

大型语言模型(LLM)对齐通常依赖基于梯度的强化学习方法(如GRPO),但需复杂分布式训练、大量显存和精细调参,难以扩展至百亿参数规模。本文提出ESSA:一种无梯度的可扩展对齐框架,仅通过前向推理与黑箱优化实现对齐。该方法聚焦于低秩适配器(LoRA),并进一步对每个适配器矩阵进行奇异值分解(SVD),仅优化奇异值以压缩参数空间。该降维设计使进化搜索适用于超大规模模型,并支持在量化为INT4和INT8的推理模式下高效运行。在多个基准测试中,相比GRPO,ESSA使Qwen2.5-Math-7B在GSM8K上准确率提升12.6%,在PRM800K上提升14.8%;使LLaMA3.1-8B在IFEval上提升22.5%。在大规模设置下,针对Qwen2.5-32B在PRM800K任务上,使用16块GPU时达到近优精度的速度是GRPO的两倍,128块GPU时快六倍。结果表明,进化策略是梯度方法的有力替代,兼具竞争力性能与显著降低的耗时与工程开销。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) typically relies on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) with gradient-based optimizers such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) or Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). While effective, these methods require complex distributed training, large memory budgets, and careful hyperparameter tuning, all of which become increasingly difficult at billion-parameter scale. We present ESSA, Evolutionary Strategies for Scalable Alignment, a gradient-free framework that aligns LLMs using only forward inference and black-box optimization. ESSA focuses optimization on Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA) and further compresses their parameter space by optimizing only the singular values from an singular value decomposition (SVD) of each adapter matrix. This dimensionality reduction makes evolutionary search practical even for very large models and allows efficient operation in quantized INT4 and INT8 inference mode. Across these benchmarks ESSA improves the test accuracy of Qwen2.5-Math-7B by 12.6% on GSM8K and 14.8% on PRM800K, and raises the accuracy of LLaMA3.1-8B on IFEval by 22.5%, all compared with GRPO. In large-scale settings ESSA shows stronger scaling than gradient-based methods: on Qwen2.5-32B for PRM800K it reaches near-optimal accuracy twice as fast on 16 GPUs and six times as fast on 128 GPUs compared with GRPO. These results position evolutionary strategies as a compelling, hardware-friendly alternative to gradient-based LLM alignment, combining competitive quality with substantially reduced wall-clock time and engineering overhead.

大模型对齐进化策略低秩适配量化推理

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